Cuban missile crisis: 50 years on – in pictures

Cuban missile crisis: 50 years on – in pictures

On 14 October 1962, a US air force plane captured photographic proof of Soviet missile bases under construction in Cuba, setting in train the crisis which brought the US and the Soviet Union close to nuclear war

A group from Women Strike for Peace holding placards relating to the Cuban missile crisis. They were part of a larger group of 800 women strikers for peace on 47th St near the United Nations building in New York in 1962

Miami, Florida, 22 October 1962: Federico Fidel Fernandez, a Miami Cuban refugee, listens to President Kennedy's television address in which the president explained the United States' position on the Cuban situation to the American people and the world

A Kennedy administration official showing aerial views of one of the Cuban medium-range missile bases, taken in October 1962, to the members of the United Nations security council, at the request of Adlai Stevenson, US ambassador to the United Nations

An aerial picture taken 9 November 1962 off the Cuban coast of the Soviet freighter Anosov carrying missiles in accordance with the US-Soviet agreement on the withdrawal of the Russian missiles from Cuba. American planes and helicopters flew at low level to keep close check on the dismantling and loading operations, while US warships watch over Soviet freighters carrying missiles back to the Soviet Union

The coffin of Major Rudolf Anderson Jr, the sole casualty of the Cuban missile crisis, is lifted on to a Swiss plane at Havana's airport on 6 November 1962. Major Anderson's U-2 spy plane was shot down by a Soviet-supplied SA-2 missile, on 27 October 1962 over Cuba